Boston Grammar School

THE SUCCESSION of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister has led to articles in the press about his home town in Scotland, Kirkaldy. One theme has been the number of celebrated or successful people who have emerged from a place where the protestant virtues of hard work and self help held sway for so long.

Men like Adam Smith, the ‘father of modern economics’ and apostle of the free market. I always remember learning about him at school and was particularly struck by his analysis of the division of labour. His most famous illustration was the pin, to produce which requires 19 separate operations.

Robert Adam, the architect, came from Kirkaldy, as did David Steel, the Liberal Democrat politician, and Sandford Fleming, who built the Canadian Pacific Railway. Another Scots-Canadian from Kirkaldy was the recently deceased Bertha Wilson, who became the first female judge of the Canadian Supreme Court.

And I mustn’t forget Jocky Wilson, world champion darts player.

ANOTHER POLITICAL STORY recently was the Conservative opposition’s change of policy on grammar schools, secondary schools where pupils are selected on academic ability. Most secondary schools in Britain are comprehensive, but some grammar schools have survived, especially in Lincolnshire. They remain a bone of political contention.

At the age of ten I was set an examination at my primary school. I had little idea of what it was all about, but some time later I was told that I would be going to Boston Grammar School. Apparently I had passed the ‘eleven-plus’. My family seemed very pleased, even proud. I myself was, if anything, merely relieved that I wouldn’t be attending the secondary modern school, about which I’d heard horror stories about initiation ceremonies.

THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL occupies a former monastery, Franciscans or Greyfriars I believe, together with modern additions. It was granted its charter by (Bloody) Mary I and the main building, ‘the old school’, now the library, has a stained glass window depicting her alongside her husband, Philip of Spain. Philip thought being married to the Queen Regnant entitled him to be called King of England, and later would send the Armada in an attempt to make that a dream a reality. I remain quite proud of my old school, but not the bloodthirsty Catholic and foreign invader who founded it.

Lessons were held in classrooms arranged in a rectangle around a large grassed quadrangle. Teachers often wore gowns and would dispense summary corporal punishment for minor infractions. Surnames only were used. It was also a single-sex school, although in recent years the sixth form has become co-educational. I find it odd that the idea prevails that sixteen and seventeen year-olds are better able to work ‘maturely’ with the opposite sex than eleven-year olds. Be that as it may, the award of best scholar of the year was recently awarded to one of the girls.

All in all, an old-fashioned institution, with emphasis on discipline, competition and academic achievement.

In the sixties I was in favour of comprehensive education, Frankly I am still uneasy about the stark division of pupils into ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ at an early age, with little free flow between them. Moreover, it has always seemed wrong to me that the percentage attending grammar schools varies from area to area depending on places available. On the other hand I believe that the ethos of the grammar school is sadly lacking in modern education.

COMPREHENSIVE EDUCATION went wrong, in my opinion, for various reasons. First, the schools are too big. This is one area where the economies of scale do not apply. Second, it was accompanied by trendy liberal educational theories, such as the downplaying of competition and the fear of ‘elitism’. The non-selection of pupils (as I insist on calling ‘students’) was extended with the new schools so that streaming was no longer the norm. Third – and this is not the fault of schools – a new breed of parents was coming into being, who are frankly incompetent at the job, unable to discipline or motivate, concerned only with earning money for foreign holidays and second cars, thinking that the rearing of children is the government’s job.

It’s an indictment of the social mess we have created that grammar schools, for all their apparent unfairness, remain quiet commonsense engines of social mobility, leaning and citizenship.

IF YOU ASK what has all this to do with the Hundlebys, the answer is ‘not a lot’. Merely that BGS is my old school. What’s more, I once delivered newspapers to the home of one the school’s more celebrated old boys, R J Budge, boss of a company running some of Britain’s few remaining coal mines. As I remember the household had two newspapers a day – that always impressed me – probably The Telegraph and The Daily Mail. You could tell a lot about people from the newspapers they bought.

Another famous old boy was George Bass, surgeon and explorer, who gave his name to the strait between Australia and Tasmania.

Lincolnshire has had more than its fair share of explorers. Yorkshire, as usual, grabs the glory with James Cook, the only English captain to tour Australia without playing a single test, but we have had Bass (from Lincon), Flinders (from Donington) and Franklin (from Spilsby).

As a film fan I must pay tribute, though, to Barry Spikings, who left BGS to work for the Boston Standard and somehow ended up in Hollywood producing The Deerhunter. Now that is an achievement.

I became a librarian. Hey ho!